Dialogue between equipment and MES hosted in a validated context

A leading laboratory in its field

With a presence in 50 countries, this laboratory, a historic leader in its field of specialities, has a large number of production processes at its several French sites, transforming animal or plant strains into finished products.

Our customer has launched a programme to modernise its industrial information system, with the aim of supporting all production processes and guaranteeing operational excellence in a regulated environment. After choosing, with the help of SPC, the Solution MES which will be at the heart of its future Production Information System for the implementation of the electronic manufacturing file, our Customer wanted to implement the communication between its newly implemented MES Solution and its field equipment.

Bringing together equipment and MES hosted in a validated context

Our customer wanted to bring its MES hosted with its field equipment on part of its installations with a view to eventually deploying the solution on all lines without calling into question the qualification of lines that have already been validated.

Standardise data recovery practices, virtualise MES and communication servers, secure exchanges between production and the remotely hosted MES, qualify the solution through different environments (tests, pre-production, production), capitalise tests on environments to diminish downtime related to qualification…. these were our Client’s challenges.

A qualified and secure OPC UA solution

An approach based on 69 points of questioning, divided into 4 criteria (general, architecture, security, qualification) was put in place to enable the choice of the most appropriate communication server for our Customer’s needs.

The choice fell on KEPWARE’s OPC UA solution as a virtualised server, interfaced with the MES on one side and the production equipment on the other.

On the strength of this choice, SPC implemented the technical architecture and the communications with the equipment, created and led the training sessions for the teams on the communication and data security solution implemented, and supported the customer team throughout the roll-out.

In order to anticipate and facilitate the deployment of new production sectors, and with the aim of validating the exchanges between the equipment, the communication server and the MES server, it should be noted that test and pre-production architectures have been set up to interface communicating equipment using the same protocols as those present in Production.

7 sectors to be deployed on 2 sites

In production at the pilot site for over a year, the solution implemented is now giving full satisfaction.

The validation carried out on the pilot perimeter had confirmed the optimisation that could be expected over the duration of the tests. The flexibility with which the chosen solution could be implemented also meant that we could be reassured that it would be easy to integrate new production sectors without jeopardising current operations.

Harmonise the data, prepare production lines to interface with each other with the MES and communicate production sectors (7) for 2 sites with a MES unique hosted, A roll-out programme has been put in place, based on a technical approach that has now been fully validated.

This is a positive outcome of the close collaboration initiated during the construction phase of the MES project, which has resulted in to provide our customer with SPC’s MES expertise, as well as its technical IT/OT implementation skills.